


Orphans’ Tears

by FrenchTwistResistance



Series: They Didn’t Send Invitations Out for the Fox Wedding [3]
Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-22 14:47:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22784635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: If the Spellmans are witches, Mary’s taught one and shot one and fucked one. She’s having trouble figuring out what that might mean for her—what it might mean for her unaccounted for months as well as for her eternal soul.
Relationships: Hilda Spellman/Mary Wardwell | Madam Satan | Lilith, Hilda Spellman/Original Mary Wardwell
Series: They Didn’t Send Invitations Out for the Fox Wedding [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1600171
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	Orphans’ Tears

It’s raining.

It rains a lot.

Mary’s sitting on an overstuffed velvet armchair in front of a roaring fire in her own house.

Her hair is damp, but she herself is not soaked to the proverbial gills. Her belted raincoat that had protected her from so much had been deposited on the railing on the front porch. And besides, she’s been sitting here for an indeterminate amount of time. She knows she’s been here longer than she probably estimates, but she also doesn’t know that at all.

Her house seems like a kind of vortex to her these days. Not an eye of the storm, exactly. Not a black hole, exactly. Not haunted, exactly. But not not any of those things, exactly, either. Just very much not hers anymore but some entity unto itself, maybe.

But more likely like. She had left a home at some inscrutable point in the past several months ago and had returned to a funhouse mirror version of a home at some inscrutable point—some inscrutable point in the more recent past when she’d awoken naked and sweaty in definitely her own bed but fitted with black satin sheets she’d definitely not bought herself, joints stiff and aching, mouth dry, cunt wet, absolutely no thoughts in her brain just a blank yearning canvas of dendrites. 

It had been the most bizarre feeling she’d ever felt until she’d roused herself and had felt even more bizarre each passing second stretching into each passing day. More and more references to events she had no knowledge of. More and more feelings she had no memories to which to tie them. More and more confusing and intense desires and arousals.

She shakes herself out of the train of thought she’s been on, but she’s not off the train entirely; she’s merely switched tracks.

A stoking of fire. A rearrangement of logs. A choice of iron implements. Shuffle scuffle red orange yellow.

Mary sits. She soaks in the heat. She contemplates different contemplations.

She could’ve taken the .32, but that’s small potatoes. Not a guarantee. 

On her lap is the .45 revolver.

She looks down at it. Cold steel and the cold physics of ballistics.

It’s all mechanics from this angle. 

Someone has wronged her and she’s fired back accordingly: this for that, tit for tat, eye for eye. Hollow point and lead jacket. Pins and gears and chambers and cylinders. A Rube Goldberg machine of destruction.

But that’s not exactly Mary, if Mary is so bothered as to be Mary rather than someone else, someone Mary herself can’t access. A lot wrapped up, a lot loosed from wrappings. Neither here nor there.

The gun is in her lap.

She’s sitting before the fire and philosophizing.

Mary Wardwell has shot someone.

She has seen the life receding from a person’s eyes.

Death, maybe. But a resurrection, too. She’s not sure whose death or whose resurrection.

This is supposed to be some consolation, some reprieve, some leveling of grievances with this violence. There is supposed to be some holy thing here, righteousness.

Mary blinks at the gun and then looks instead at her far wall.

The cross is upside down again or still. She can’t remember the last time she’d tried to right it. 

Peter had been crucified that way, and he had been the first Pope. The rock of the Church. But he’d also been often nude and often stupid and often violent.

She thinks of that priest who had visited her, his chiseled face, his powerful body, his chiseled, powerful words.

She thinks of that woman with her own face coming forward at that priest’s insistence—the way that woman who had tricked her and was still tricking her—penetrating her with her very own eyes.

She thinks of that apparition with her own face coming forward of her own volition sitting smugly on her lap, breathing brimstone into her ear.

She shivers and places the gun gingerly on an ottoman, gets up to add a log to the fire.

It sizzles and pops and hisses, and it is the same sound her mind is making. A reluctant burning sound. The wrong wood or a wet wood. Attempting to do something it’s supposed to do but because of circumstances can’t adequately fulfill. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak; what I would, that do I not, but what I hate, that do I.

If the Spellmans are witches, she’s taught one and shot one and fucked one. She’s having trouble figuring out what that might mean for her—what it might mean for her unaccounted for months as well as for her eternal soul.

She thinks of that afternoon in the library, how she’d dominated the nice sister—if a witch can be described that way. The memory excites her as much as it shames her. There’d been something in her, in her flesh, that had compelled her, some muscle memory her amnesiac whole self couldn’t and can’t understand.

She’s not trying to understand now. But she is trying to process, organize her thoughts. 

Perhaps understanding will come later, after she’s accepted and perhaps repented for all the things she’s done and all the things she doesn’t remember she’s done, she thinks. She hopes. She prays.

She’s looking into the fire, and it’s grown and then diminished again. She wonders how long she’s been sitting here. She wonders when the police will come for her, if they’re creeping up her driveway in their tactical gloves with their shotguns, scoping out the back of the house silent as thieves. She wonders why she hasn’t turned herself in, why she’s torturing herself with the waiting and the thinking.

She can’t be here alone with her thoughts any longer. She’ll go mad. She’ll burn the place down. She’ll Smith and Wesson herself into the sweet release of oblivion. Something. Something bad is bound to happen. She looks again at the upside down cross and steels herself.

Mary brushes her teeth, washes her face, changes her clothes.

She’s on the porch sliding into her belted raincoat as the sun has just risen enough to be seen through the woods. The sun is shining, but it’s still raining.

The devil’s beating his wife, as the saying goes.

Maybe he is. Maybe he’s not. Maybe the wife had deserved it.

Mary doesn’t think any woman deserves to be brutalized. 

No woman but her, that is. And even then, only by her own hands.

She drives into town to give her confession, sits in the dark booth of her secrets.

Mary hardly feels absolved. She hadn’t told the whole story, but not for not wanting to. It just. Had refused to come out. Something in her, in her flesh, had refused to come out. Something was soldered there, welded there. 

Reinforced steel beams of something horrible, and as much as she wants to remove them, she doesn’t have the right tools.

“How long since your last confession, my child?” She had expected a different voice. That chiseled, powerful voice. But it hadn’t been. It had been thin and reedy and old. Probably one of those ancient Irish priests you see in black and white movies—comforting in a way but not what she’d been seeking. But what had she been seeking?

“I don’t know, Father.” And that had been the absolute truth. Three months of her life a blur of impressions of feelings, none of which she can pin down into something sane.

She’d said as much as she could say, and he had blessed her confusedly.

There have been Hail Marys and Our Fathers. She’s lit plenty of candles and said plenty of rosaries.

For some regular sin all this would’ve been enough. For some regular circumstance all this would’ve been enough. But this is not regular, and this is not enough.

Mary wants to get naked and cut off somebody’s ear. Peter’s always been her favorite, after all.

She wants and wants. Desires, covets, doesn’t want to want.

It’s two weeks later, and she’s not in jail. If only she could have turned herself in to the authorities. But she’d been physically unable to force herself to do so. Maybe not steel beams, maybe a lead weight. Maybe a cinder block around her ankles. Maybe an exercise in masochistic anxiety and paranoia and doubt and confusion.

Since that night she’s been thinking. She’s been riding on an extravagantly attired swan on a carousel of never-ending but circular thoughts—calliope faster and faster and louder and louder and more and more maddening.

There are witches here, agents of evil, perverse and blasphemous. But are there and are they?

Perhaps priests should be required to carry a badge, some official identification. Any joker can buy a clerical collar at a novelty shop.

But still. She feels a lot of things, almost none of them guilt. She’d acted on the information she had had and her own conviction. Logic and faith. She can understand that part. Has come to terms with that part. It’s all the other parts that niggle and wiggle and wrangle and wrestle.

Jacob had wrestled with God. And Sarah had laughed at Him. And both had ultimately been counted as righteous. So maybe Mary’s not so bad off.

Of all the thoughts and feelings she’s cycling through, it’s mostly rage inside her. But she’s not sure where to put it, where to direct it, how to even have it. She’s never had it before and doesn’t know how to fold it and fit it into a drawer. She can do that with other emotions she doesn’t want but must store somewhere. She’s got wardrobes full of neatly pressed Lust and closets lined with Envy on pretty velvet hangers and a cherry wood china hutch clinking with shined Pride. 

And perhaps the worst thing about it is that it bleeds out onto all her other feelings and stains everything. All the tidiness she’s worked for her entire life ruined with a single errant strand of something she doesn’t recall acquiring but can’t get rid of. 

It’s a Friday afternoon just after school’s let out, and it’s raining. 

It rains a lot. 

It’s raining, and the sun is shining.

She’s been driving around aimlessly, and she’s spotted a rainbow. She’d known there wouldn’t be a pot of gold at the end of it, but she hadn’t known it wasn’t a sign of a covenant of some kind. She drives toward it, propelled, impelled by some innate thing within her.

Mary finds herself pulling up the drive to the Spellman Mortuary.

She’d been looking for a covenant, and here she is, at this place where she’d shot someone. 

She immediately throws the Lincoln into reverse. She can’t be here. Something bad is bound to happen. Her .32 is in the glove compartment, and she can hear it clunk against its confines as the car jolts. (She’d thrown the incriminating .45 into a lake several days ago.)

But there’s a flutter at a window sash and then the front door is opening.

Sabrina’s on the porch, waving at her, waving for her to approach.

She could drive away and claim later that she’d merely been turning around.

But Mary doesn’t believe in coincidence; she believes in grand plans and Divine Providence. She parks. She slides the .32 into the pocket of her raincoat. She walks up to the porch, tries to make her face and body neutral. There’d been a time in her life when she hadn’t had to try to be neutral; she’d just been that way naturally—a nonthreatening presence, regular and forgettable. But now with all this rage.

“Miss Wardwell! Hi! It’s always so nice to see you, but I’m sorry for your loss,” Sabrina says.

“Excuse me?” Mary says. She’s suffered many losses recently, but she’s certain Sabrina is privy to exactly zero of them.

“I was just assuming that’s why you’re here. My aunts run a funeral home…?”

“Oh, of course. No. I. I was just in the neighborhood. Thought I’d drop by and say hello,” Mary says. It’s not true, but it’s not not true. And anyway she’d like to know some things, figure out some things. Are these people the people that priest had said they were? Sabrina had said aunts plural, so what of that woman she’d shot? That woman who had called her Lilith just before the bang? She believes in Divine Providence, in being where she should be at the time she should be. She used to believe that, anyway. Maybe she still does.

“Even better!” Sabrina says. “Join us for dinner?”

“I hate to impose,” Mary says.

“It’s no imposition at all!” a disembodied English voice says, and then Hilda appears behind the screen door. She’s wiping her hands on her apron, and her eyes are flitting from Mary’s face to the floorboards to Sabrina’s left shoulder. Flitting and flitting, excited and embarrassed. “We love having guests for dinner, and we always cook too much for us to eat ourselves.”

The steel beams, the cinder block. This time propping her up rather than weighing her down. She pointedly looks straight into Hilda’s eyes. Hilda flinches and then looks back. They look at each other, and there is so much there, so much that Mary knows she can’t grasp with her current knowledge but also knows Hilda is grasping. It’s something to do with her missing time, and it’s something to do with the latent feelings she’s barely touched, and it’s something to do with the carousel of thoughts, and it’s something to do with whatever dam is in her flesh keeping things from spilling over. It’s something to do with a lot of things. And above all, it’s something between them.

So she hadn’t dreamed it. That time in the library had been real. It’s a relief as much as it’s a mystery yet to be solved.

“Thank you. I appreciate your hospitality,” Mary says.

She enters the house.

And there’s the woman she had shot, presumably to death.

But she’s not dead. Or even visibly injured.

The woman is turning the handle on an antique pasta press.

“Zelds. We’ve got a guest. Miss Wardwell’s joining us for supper,” Hilda says from somewhere behind Mary.

Zelda looks up through tousled strands of strawberry blonde, slows her cranking but doesn’t stop entirely. There’s no recognition there in her eyes except for the recognition of seeing someone one knows in passing. No accusation. No anger. No resentment.

The last time Mary had seen those eyes, it had been much the same. When the woman had realized Mary wasn’t who she’d thought she’d been, it had been all resignation. A quiet acceptance of what would happen next. Dignified death.

But she isn’t dead.

Mary wonders about that and wonders about a lot of other things besides.

They all eat together. They all talk together. It is warm and comfortable. A regular guest with regular hosts. 

Mary is wine-drunk and reeling. She should have turned herself in, but how can one confess to a crime that by all appearances hasn’t been committed? 

Sabrina and Ambrose have excused themselves, have left the premises, in fact. Zelda has begged off to the music room. It’s Hilda and Mary sitting across from each other at the dining table now.

Mary can’t figure whether this is worse or better. Or whether it’s neutral. She’s so far removed from neutral these days. She’s so far removed from so much these days.

“How are you, Miss Wardwell?” Hilda says.

Hilda’s looking at her so hard as to be scrutinizing.

“Fine,” Mary says. It’s a lie, and she knows Hilda knows that.

“Then why are you here?” Hilda says.

Mary doesn’t have an answer for that.


End file.
